Monday, September 30, 2013

The first book by the British photographer, who was only 21 at the time. The title features mostly images, not dissimilar in style to Ryan McGinley, which incorporate nudity into the London urban setting.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Mario Montez, the Warhol superstar who also appeared in Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, died last week at the age of seventy-eight. Montez was born René Rivera, but renamed himself in his teenage years, as a tribute to actress and gay icon Maria Montez (an obsession he shared with Smith). He is best known for appearing in thirteen films by Andy Warhol, most notably Chelsea Girls.

Montez also co-founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company with Charles Ludlam, and the group rehearsed at Montez’s SoHo loft. In 1977 he retired from the NYC underground scene and relcoated to Orlando, Florida, where he has been working clerical jobs.

“People thought that I didn’t want to talk to anybody, but no, I was looking for a better environment for my health,” he told the NYC Daily News, “you get tired of the cold weather.”

He resurfaced briefly in 2006, taking part in the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, alongside Tony Conrad, Billy Name, John Zorn, Mike Kelley, Jonas Mekas, John Waters and Robert Wilson. He attended a Smith tribute in Berlin the following year.

On March 31st, 2010, Columbia University held an all-day event called Superstar! A Tribute to Mario Montez, which featured film screenings, round-table discussions and a conversation with the actor. Organizer Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race called him “...one of the most gifted performers of the underground period.”

Surely the most over-used and misapplied art world aphorism is Andy Warhol's "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes". The statement, which was first quoted in Time Magazine in October of 1967, presumably speaks to shrinking attention spans and disposable celebrity culture more so than guaranteeing a moment in the spotlight, however brief, to every single citizen. Since Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr and Twitter, the impulse is to interpret the original utterance as prophetic, but also somewhat quaint. A 2007 Banksy sculpture features a variation of the line stenciled onto the screen of a painted pink television: "In the future everyone will be anonymous for fifteen minutes". An essay on the changing makeup of the music industry by the artist Momus opens with the line "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people". Warhol himself had a go at revising his own statement in 1979, when he said "I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.”"

In 2011, John Baldessari took the axiom as the starting point for a public art project for the Sydney Festival, called Your Name in Lights. An LED sign reminiscent of a Broadway or Hollywood marquee was installed on the facade of The Australian Museum, and participants could register to have their name lit up on the sign and simultaneously live-streamed over the web. Baldessari set the time at 15 seconds, suggesting an acceleration of Warhol's prediction. "Warhol is so yesterday”, says the artist, who turned 82 earlier this summer, “be a celebrity for 15 seconds! Be a celebrity, a living legend and an idol. Experience the thrill of seeing your name in lights!".

By appealing to the audience's narcissism (as well as the desire to see text actualized, as anything other than a font on a computer screen), the work was a huge success, attracting the participation of over 100,000 people. It's a festival-ready piece, the type of crowd-pleaser I've seen pitched countless times as a Selection Committee Member for Toronto's Nuit Blanche.

Who's in A Name?, by Los Angeles artist Susan Silton, documents an intervention that improves upon the original. She put out a call to other artists in advance of the Baldessari launch, asking them each to register a name. But not their own – they were asked to sign-up to have the marquee display the name of an artist who had committed suicide. Some of the names were well known in the art world, such as the Canadian-born, California-based Jack Goldstein who killed himself in 2003, or Ray Johnson, whose 1995 suicide is considered by many to be his final work, an elaborate mysterious performance.1

Others are more obscure, found on a Wikipedia page of suicide victims that left a profound impression on Silton2. "I was greatly moved by it for many reasons," she told Artforum, earlier this year, "primarily because of its sheer existence and secondly because there were so many artists on the list that I didn’t recognize. When I stumbled on Baldessari’s project, it was a kind of perfect storm; the Wikipedia archive immediately sprang to mind the subjects his project was addressing—the illusion, promise, and acceleration of fame. Baldessari's platform seemed to me like the ideal venue to give life to the Wikipedia list."

Questions of fame typically surround any artist suicide. Was the indifference of the world towards their work a motivating factor? Some of the artists featured in Silton’s project were later recognized, after their deaths. Francesca Woodman, for example, took her life at the age of 22, in 1981. Depressed by an unsuccessful attempt to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (and from a failed romantic relationship) she leapt out of her loft window. Recently her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Kunsthal in Rotterdam, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, whereas she had very few exhibitions in her lifetime. Numerous books of her photographs have been published posthumously, and a highly rated feature length film about her life was released in 2010.3

Other examples are more complicated. Jack Goldstein hanged himself from a tree in the yard of his Los Angeles home in 2003 just as his work was beginning to be reevaluated. Once successful, the artist fell on hard times in the early nineties and exiled himself to the Californian desert. Friends suggest that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with his comeback, and that old resentments die hard.

Controversial suicides seem to be pointedly left out of Silton’s project. Mark Lombardi, whose work mapped intricate ties between governments and criminal activity attracted the attention of the FBI4 and whose studio was mysteriously ransacked, was found dead in 2000.5 In the summer of 2007 artist Jeremy Blake and his filmmaker girlfriend Theresa Duncan both committed suicide; Duncan of an overdose and Blake a week later was seen walking into the ocean, where he drowned. Vanity Fair6 published a story which raised doubts about their deaths, and noted allegations of harassments from Scientologists. Blake had done an album cover for Beck, who he had agreed to star in a film by Duncan, something which the singer later denied outright, despite having given an interview to an Italian journalist months prior where he listed it as part of his upcoming activities. Blake had warned friends that if something happened to them, they should suspect foul play.

In a brief back and forth with the artist, I ask if Mike Kelley would’ve been included if the piece had happened a year later. She replies “While [Kelley] is super important with regard to this project's timing, as well as some of the chatter that surrounded his suicide with regard to motivation, etc., no, I wouldn't have chosen him precisely because he is so iconic at this point in time.” She also points out that Jack Goldstein and Ray Johnson are fairly generic sounding names, unlike Rothko or Van Gogh.

"I began to think about the ways in which we identified with this sequence of letters as being ourselves, even if we have the same name as countless other people," she told Sharon Mizota of KCET.org. "A name becomes the stand-in for the body." As the title of the book suggests, Who’s In A Name, poses questions about authorship, “name recognition”, and the artist’s name as stand in or guarantor. The volume starts to become as much about text and the way that works and artists are written about, tying back to Baldessari’s ostensible interest in fame as subject matter.

The book addresses the cultural stigma surrounding suicide, a topic rarely tackled head-on without some feeling of exploitation, sensationalism or well-intentioned condescension. Silton began to think differently about suicide after seeing footage of people jumping from the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11. "I realized in that moment that that was a choice. It was a forced choice, but it was still a choice. It's a way of taking control of your death, and I find that absolutely stunning and very proactive." The insight reminds me of a David Cronenberg interview I read in Rolling Stone in 1992, where the filmmaker addresses the idea of suicide:

"It´s probably the only way we can give our death a meaning. Because otherwise it´s completely arbitrary. It comes because of small bodily misfunctions or some accident - a safe falls on your head. You´re Krazy Kat and a safe falls on your head and it doesn´t mean anything! It means fuck-all. And so you say, I don´t like this, I don´t like the fact that death, which is a pretty important moment in my life, I don´t like this to have no meaning. The only way you can do anything about that is to control the moment and the means of your death. And that means suicide, basically."7

The artists who participated in Who’s In A Name were asked to forward Silton the announcements they received regarding the timing of the name they registered. She then sat at her computer, at all hours of the day and night for the weeks that Baldessari’s piece was active, collecting screen grabs as they appeared in the online live-stream. These images are collected for the book, which also includes 200-word biographies of the participants, both the artists who helped her register names (a group which includes Yvonne Rainer, who herself had attempted suicide in 19718) and the artists memorialized in the work.

Brief bios are a staple of art book publishing, but when they are foregrounded, as they are here (they take up the bulk of the book), the absurdity of summarizing a life (or even a life’s work) comes into sharp focus. A commissioned essay from Liz Kotz, which rounds out the volume, notes that “Most often, when we encounter them in books, catalogs, and publicity materials, the authors and sources for short biographical identifications are unacknowledged. They may have been written by the subjects themselves or culled and compiled from all sorts of found and existing information…How can a text represent one person, while appearing in the voice of another? Whose narrative is this? Who controls this story?” These questions of authorship and representation becomes less academic and gain poignancy when placed in the context of a collection of artists who have taken their own lives.

While the work existed first as a public intervention and as a large scale painting (of the Goldstein grab), Who’s in a Name? functions best here, as a bookwork, which is handsomely bound and produced in an edition of 500. It’s available at the MOCA store, here, for $40.00.

"I first saw the pancake stack up of girls in a cheezey magazine I bought at 7/11, while on tour across the U.S. with my band “The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black”. It was a picture that I always remembered. I duplicated it live at the Disinformation Conference in New York in 2002. Samoa filmed us that night with his new camera. He was excited about this new performance too. We were in our traditional band outfits... I gave Alice a turkey baster filled with plain yogurt that she ‘splooged’ onto me as I was on the top.

A couple of years later, at a show in Los Angeles that was organized by Ron Atheyand Vaginal Creme Davis... I did the W.O.V. live again and we decided to do a photo shoot in the garden of the hotel we were staying at. The Highland Gardens. These are the photos by Bruce La Bruce, Legendary filmaker....

Bruce La Bruce’s direction was perfect. He made us feel beautiful and important. It was a little precarious because we just sort of free~balled the situation and pretended like everything was normal when we were shooting. He motivated us to focus on our intentions. Bruce is a very important ‘pre~code’ filmaker. Because of him... punk rock boys everywhere blossomed into glamourous porn stars and artists."

Friday, September 27, 2013

Tomorrow evening is the opening reception for Ben in Holland, a fifty year retrospective of works by Ben Vautier. The exhibition, which runs from September 28th to October 26th at the Cult Club Shop in Amsterdam is a collaboration between Harry Ruhe's Galerie A, artKitchen Gallery and Luiscius Books.

A catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Titled Ben Vautier: INTROSPECTION TRUTH ART & SEX, the book consists of 50 luxury copies, each numbered and signed, accompanied by a mirror with a text by BEN.

Yesterday David Bryne sent a message to his email list announcing that How Music Works, released a year ago this month as a (soft) hardcover (& Ebook), is now available in paperback.

He writes: "The book took me a number of years to write and revise, and revise again—but it’s essentially a book with one idea: that context shapes music. Music isn’t an autonomous thing; what we hear is shaped by many extra-musical factors. Some chapters are autobiographical and anecdotal—as I can use my recording and performing experience to talk about how those mediums have affected my own musical output. Other chapters delve into (amongst other things) the economics of the music business, the acoustics of venues, music education and the idea of support for the arts… and whether or not musical structures are hard-wired in us.

The hardback that McSweeney’s did is a beautiful object (and is still available), but this version might be easier to carry around—and it’s cheaper. Plus it has new words and pictures."

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Artist and Curator Michalis Pichler's My Gallery is the World Now / Books and Ideas after Seth Siegelaub opens a week from tomorrow at the Center for Book Arts in New York.

The exhibition features works by and about the legendary art dealer, curator, author, researcher and tireless promoter of conceptual art Seth Siegelaub, who died earlier this summer at the age of 72. Many of Siegelaub's best works (such as the classic Xerox Book or One Month) explored the possibilities of the publication as an exhibition space.

Alongside original works by Siegelaub (both hard copies, and digital versions, as available from the Primary Information website), Pichler is presenting contemporary bookworks that respond and refer to Siegelaub's legacy. Participants involved include artists Jonathan Monk, Eric Doeringer and Derek Sullivan, as well as gallerists Florence Loewy, Emmanuel Herve and the late Steve Leiber.

The show runs until the 14th of December at 28 West 27th St in New York. For more information, visit the Center for Book Arts site, here.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Available in editions of fifty, the above belt buckles by Cary Leibowitz commemorate fictional events and institutions in the history of art and self-help. Not dissimilar to Terence Gower's boxed gallery identification tags, 1971 (see earlier post, here), the works use titles, locations and dates to suggest an only-slightly alternate history.

Ben Patterson's Fluxus staple Lick Piece, for example, becomes desexualized when the licking of whip cream is only from an ice cream cone. The less sensationalized everyday act becomes more like a George Brecht Fluxus event, only with overtones of carnival competitions. The Alice B Toklas Clam Bake Sale's repeated title reminds of the impossibility of untangling the legend of Toklas from that of her lover, Gertrude Stein. (note: Leibowitz is currently cooking his way through the recipes in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook). A gathering of Concrete Poets local to New England for a picnic seems possibly only if one imagines the Bay Area Dadaists to be anything other than a small group of collaborators who settled on the moniker.

I'm not sure what Tippy Toe Tuesdays consist of, but it remains my favorite of the series.

The buckles are part of Leibowitz' current show Paintings and Belt Buckles, which has been shortlisted in the New Yorker and Art in America, and reviewed, here, in Artforum. The exhibition continues until October 13th at Invisible Exports on 89 Eldridge Street.

"Cary Leibowitz is that rare miserabilist who has the self-awareness and dexterity of mind to transform his sadness into some of the most thoughtfully conceived comedy out there."

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Frosst Books is located in an old Bottle Depot on historic 9th Ave in Inglewood, Calgary. The once derelict building also houses the Pith Gallery and Studios and is across the street from the new Esker Foundation. John Frosst, a member of The Arbour Lake Sghool collective, was a co-founder of Pith and opened Frosst Books shortly afterwards. The store carries artists' books, books on Art, Design and Architecture; zines, prints and more.

The store keeps sporadic hours (Frosst is currently in the Netherlands with the Arbour Lake Sghool, on residency) but we dropped by the other day when it was supposed to be closed, and happily discovered it open.

Visit their website here (which may have expired) or their Facebook page, here.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.